- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
And that's the title--"Nematodes as Bioindicators of Soil Health and Climate Resiliency"--of her seminar that she will present to the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology on Monday, Nov. 25 in 122 Briggs Hall. The Zoom link:
https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/95882849672.
"Soil health is an emerging field that holistically approaches key challenges within soil science through a chemical, physical, and biological lens," Sprunger says in her abstract. "In recent years, soil health has become foundational to sustainability goals within the context of regenerative agriculture including climate mitigation and reversing biodiversity trends. However, given the vast array of indicators used to quantify soil health, there are still several unknowns regarding which indicators can most effectively indicate specific soil health outcomes and ecosystem functioning. Key linkages between indicators and soil health outcomes are especially lacking in the subfield of soil biological health."
"Here, I will outline the case for integrating free-living nematodes into the soil health framework to better understand sustainability goals and climate resiliency within agroecosystems. I will explore how soil health and free-living nematode communities shift through time after almost 30 years of regenerative agriculture management. Next, I will demonstrate how nematology should be integrated with soil health indicators using advanced multivariate analyses, and I will end by talking about how nematodes are critical bioindicators of drought and flooding events within agroecosystems."
Sprunger, who joined the Department of Plant, Soil, and Microbial Sciences faculty in 2022 and is based at the W. K. Kellogg Biological Station, focuses her research on the intersection of agriculture and the environment, where she investigates how various agricultural management practices impacts soil health and ecosystem services, as related on her web page.
In addition, she is interested in "understanding how nematode communities can serve as a key soil biological health indicator within agroecosystems." She also explores "how climate change impacts rhizosphere dynamics and soil food web."
A native of Haiti, Sprunger has been interested in environment conservation and food security since her childhood.
Prior to joining MSU, she served as an assistant professor of soil science and rhizosphere processes at The Ohio State University (OSU) from 2018-2022. Her resume includes:
- National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship in biology at Columbia University, New York, where she examined the relationship between soil carbon dynamics and crop productivity in small holder farming systems in Kenya and Tanzania.
- Doctorate from MSU in crop and soil sciences and ecology, evolutionary biology, and behavior
- Bachelor's degree in forest resources and a bachelor's degree in environmental studies, University of Washington, where she minored in human rights.
Sprunger's seminar will be archived on the ENT seminar page.
Nematologist Amanda Hodson, assistant professor of soil ecology and pest management, is coordinating the ENT seminars. The full list is here. For more information or for technical issues, contact Hodson at akhodson@ucdavis.edu.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The 14th annual UC Davis Biodiversity Museum Day is set for Saturday, Feb. 8, 2025. announced coordinator and co-founder Tabatha Yang, the public education and outreach coordinator for the Bohart Museum of Entomology.
Biodiversity Museum Day. billed as a "Super Science Day," is an opportunity to see displays, engage in activities, and talk to the scientists. Visitors see everything from red-tailed hawks at the California Raptor Center, dog heartworm specimens at the nematology display, butterfly specimens and a live petting zoo at the Bohart Museum, and plants galore at the Arboretum and Public Garden, the Botanical Conservatory, and the Center for Plant Diversity. And much more.
And it's free and family friendly.
Details are progressing, but nine museums or collections--and maybe more--are expected to participate:
- Arboretum and Public Garden, Habitat Gardens in the Environmental GATEway, adjacent to the Arboretum Teaching Nursery on Garrod Drive
- Bohart Museum of Entomology, Room 1124 and main hall of the Academic Surge Building, 455 Crocker Lane
- Botanical Conservatory, the greenhouses along Kleiber Hall Drive
- California Raptor Center, 1340 Equine Lane, off Old Davis Road (Located three miles south of the central campus.)
- Center for Plant Diversity, Katherine Esau Science Hall off Kleiber Hall Drive
- Nematode Collection (part of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology), Katherine Esau Science Hall, off Kleiber Hall Drive
- Museum of Wildlife and Fish Biology, Room 1394, Academic Surge Building, 455 Crocker Lane
- Paleontology Collection, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 1309 Earth and Physical Sciences Building, 434 LaRue Road
- Phaff Yeast Culture Collection, Robert Mondavi Institute Brewery and Food Processing facility, Old Davis Road
Anthropology will not be able to participate due to departmental renovations and some key retirements.
Stay tuned for more information. The 2025 event will take place the day before Super Bowl, so it's Super Science Day on Feb. 8, and Super Bowl on Feb. 9.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Well, you never know where research will take you.
UC Davis distinguished professor Bruce Hammock, who holds a joint appointment with the Department of Entomology and Nematology and the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center, remembers how it all started.
He and fellow graduate student Sarjeet Gill, now a distinguished professor emeritus at UC Riverside, were researching insect development lab in John Casida's lab at UC Berkeley when they co-discovered the target enzyme in mammals that regulates epoxy fatty acids.
Or as Hammock said: “We were researching juvenile hormones, and how a caterpillar turns into a butterfly."
Fast forward to today.
Newly published research shows that a key regulatory enzyme inhibitor discovered in the Hammock lab can alleviate inflammation linked to health issues that are caused by a high-sugar diet.
The research paper, “Metabolomics Reveals Soluble Epoxide Hydrolase as a Therapeutic Target for High-Sucrose Diet-Mediated Gut Barrier Dysfunction,” appears in today's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). A 14-member international research team, including Hammock, authored the paper.
Lead author Jun-Yan Liu, a professor at Chongqing Medical University, China, and a former research scientist (7.5 years) in the Hammock lab, said a soluble epoxide hydrolase (sEH) inhibitor alleviated a gut barrier dysfunction caused by high-sucrose diet in a murine (mouse) model and shows promise in humans.
“Our research showed that a 16-week high sucrose diet in a murine model showed colon inflammation and a tight junction impairment,” said Liu, who specializes in metabolomics, bio-analytical chemistry, molecular pharmacology, and natural medicinal chemistry. “When we treated the mice with a chemical inhibitor of sEH, that reduced the colon inflammation and improved the tight junction impairment. That was further supported by the conditional knockout of sEH in intestinal epithelia.”
“Such gut barrier dysfunctions allow microorganisms and deleterious inflammatory materials to cross the gut wall, leading to the increased risk of a variety of diseases and particularly those associated with intestinal disease," Hammock said.
Hammock praised Liu for his work. “When Dr. Jun-Yan Liu was a postgraduate in my laboratory, he made many of the fundamental discoveries on how metabolites of polyunsaturated fatty acids regulate biology and how the soluble epoxide hydrolase inhibitors developed here can reduce inflammation and pain by altering this pathway. His studies bring up that excessive amounts of the common dietary sugar sucrose can in fact increase deleterious inflammation in rodent models and that inflammation can be at least partly resolved by an inhibitor of the soluble epoxide hydrolase now in human clinical trials. These data suggest that a lifestyle change or pharmaceutical could reduce this chronic inflammation problem associated with high sucrose consumption but also may provide a mechanism leading to its cause."
Nutrition researcher Guodong Zhang, a member of the UC Davis Department of Nutrition faculty, and a former postdoctoral fellow in the Hammock lab with Liu, commented that the study “suggests that soluble epoxide hydrolase (sEH) plays an important role in regulating intestinal barrier functions. However, the molecular mechanisms leading to intestinal barrier dysfunction remain poorly understood, and there are few available therapeutic approaches to target barrier functions.”
“I am so pleased that this pair of scientists (Zhang and Liu) are following how diet controls both the initiation and resolution of inflammation to improve human health,” Hammock commented.
“Human translation of this research could be rapid because the sEH inhibitors are currently being evaluated in human clinical trials for other disorders,” said Zhang, referring to EicOsis, a Davis-based clinical startup that Hammock co-founded in 2011 to alleviate chronic pain without the use of opioids. Its drug candidate, EC5026, has successfully completed Phase 1 human clinical trials, with no side effects.
Said Cindy McReynolds, CEO and co-founder of EicOsis: “The important work identified in this paper indicates potential future therapeutic targets for sEH inhibitors.”
Other co-authors of the PNAS paper include UC Davis organic chemist Sung Hee Hwang of the Hammock lab; and Liu's colleagues, Zhi Lin, Xian Fu, Qing Jiang, Xue Zhou, Hou-Hua Yin, Kai-I Ni, Qing-Jin Pan, Xin He, Ling-Tong Zhang, Yi-Weng Meng and Ya-Nan Lia. The team thanked biochemist Christophe Morisseau, a research scientist in the Hammock lab for reviewing the research paper.
Scientists agree that obesity is a worldwide challenge, and it continues to be a complex and costly chronic disease. Research nutritionist Susan Raatz, with the USDA's Agricultural Research Service at the Grand Forks Human Nutrition Research Center, expresses alarm about Americans' sugar intake and the health risks. “The average American eats (or drinks) 34 teaspoons of sugars a day, which is equal to 500-plus calories,” she recently wrote in a USDA publication. “This averages more than 100 pounds of sugars per person each year. Sugar intake has drastically increased over the last century. In 1822, the average American ate in 5 days the amount of sugar found in one of today's 12-ounce sodas. Now, we eat that much every 7 hours!” (See https://tinyurl.com/4cmyamez)
Hammock, a member of the UC Davis faculty since 1980, and a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, has studied sEH inhibitors for 50 years in research leading to drugs that target such diseases as diabetes, hypertension (heart disease), Alzheimer's disease, and cancer.
I keep telling Professor Hammock he'll win the Nobel Prize some day...
(Read the full news story at https://tinyurl.com/dw6k9cbh and the PNAS paper at https://tinyurl.com/49hk77dy/
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
It's Friday Fly Day and what an appropriate day to honor a syrphid fly.
This syrphid, caught in flight, was seeking nectar from a Gaura, a genus of flowering plants in the family Onagraceae, native to North America.
Syrphid flies, also known as flower flies or hover flies, belong to the family Syrphidae, one of the largest families in the order Diptera. The family includes some 6,000 described species, widely distributed around the world.
This one, with its black and yellow stripes, resembles the coloring of a yellowjacket. However, flies have only one pair of wings while bees and wasps have two. And the fly's large eyes and short antenna also distinguish it from bees and wasps.
Happy Friday Fly Day!
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
And then you notice how they are stored--in intricate wooden drawers made by entomologist and master builder Jeff Smith, volunteer curator of the Lepidoptera collection.
As of today, he's crafted a total of 2,487 drawers, and gifted them to the Bohart Museum. At the going rate of $75 per drawer, that's a whopping $186,525 worth.
"I number the lid and bottom to keep them together so I know that the next drawers I make will start with 2,488, so to date, I've made 2,487," Smith said today, when asked the total number. "Around 400 or so have been from repurposed redwood from old decks and fence posts."
He made his first drawer some 22 years ago. He explains how to make them on this website,
https://www.resourcefulentomology.com/insect-drawers.
"Entomology is my passion and the Bohart Museum is my cause," Smith says.
A Bohart volunteer since 1998, he not only crafts the drawers, but he has spread the wings of some 180,000 moths and butterflies, typically 6,000 or more each year for the past 30-plus years. He also has donated some 100,000 specimens (primarily butterflies and moths but a few other insects, including beetles) to the Bohart Museum.
In addition, he engages in public service at the Bohart Museum's open house, answering questions about the insects and the collection, and sharing his knowledge at schools, festivals and other venues. He also demonstrates the craft of pinning and spreading moths and butterflies to the UC Davis Entomology Club.
The Lepidoptera collection now totals about 750,000 specimens. Lately Smith has been redoing the header labels in the unit trays for much of the Lepidoptera collection, "making the new ones in the better format where the geographic ranges of the various species and subspecies are on the label. This is so helpful when it comes to placing new material into the collection."
For his outstanding public service, Smith received the UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences' Friend of the College Award in 2015. At the time, Lynn Kimsey, then director of the and now a UC Davis distinguished professor emerita, said: “You could not ask for a better friend than Jeff Smith. He has brought us international acclaim and saved us $160,000 through donations of specimens and materials, identification skills and his professional woodworking skills. This does not include the thousands of hours he has donated in outreach programs that draw attention to the museum, the college and the university.”
Kimsey, who directed the museum for 34 years, stepping down on Feb. 1, 2024 when Professor Jason Bond accepted the position, remembers when Smith joined the museum. “When Jeff was working for Univar Environmental Services, a 35-year career until his retirement in 2013, he would spend some of his vacation days at the museum. Over the years Jeff took over more and more of the curation of the butterfly and moth collection. He took home literally thousands of field pinned specimens and spread their wings at home (in Rocklin), bringing them back to the museum perfectly mounted."
Smith, who has loved insects since his childhood in San Jose, is an active member of the international Lepidopterists' Society (since 1967). He and his colleagues hosted the 2019 meeting of the Lepidopterists' Society in Davis.
The Gold Standard. The Bohart Museum is considered one of the top insect museums in the world. Professor Paul Opler (1938-2023) of Colorado State University, an international authority on butterflies and moths, heaped praise on the Lepidoptera collection when he said after a visit: “I consider the Bohart Lepidoptera collection to be The Gold Standard to which we all should aspire.”
Opler, who received his doctorate in entomology in 1970 from UC Berkeley, authored such noted books on butterflies and moths as the Peterson Field Guide to Butterflies of Eastern North America, the Peterson Field Guide to Butterflies of Western North America, Butterflies East of the Great Plains: An Illustrated Natural History, and Moths of Western North America. He also served as the first editor of American Entomologist, published by the Entomological Society of America).
The Bohart Museum, located in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building, 455 Crocker Lane, houses a global collection of eight million insect specimens. It also maintains a live petting zoo (Madagascar hissing cockroaches, stick insects, tarantulas and more) and an insect-themed gift shop stocked with books, posters, jewelry, t-shirts, and hooded sweatshirts. Favorite sale items include Smith's handcrafted wooden pens that he donated to the gift shop. (Email bmuseum@ucdavis.edu for more information.)
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